pulverizing everything that lived and
turning the man-filled trenches into tombs. Hence there is no longer
any such thing as a continuous line of trenches. Indeed, there are no
longer any trenches at all, nor entanglements either, but only a
series of craters. It is these craters which the French infantry has
held with such unparalleled heroism. The men holding the craters are
kept supplied with food and ammunition from the chain of little
forts--Vaux, Douaumont, and the others--and the forts, themselves
battered almost to pieces by the torrents of steel which have been
poured upon them, have relied in turn on the citadel back in Verdun
for their reinforcements, their ammunition, and their provisions, all
of which have had to be sent out at night, the latter on the backs of
men.

So violent and long-continued have been the hurricanes of steel which
have swept these slopes, that the surface of the earth has been
literally blasted away, leaving a treacherous and incredibly tenacious
quagmire in which horses and even soldiers have lost their lives.
General Dubois told me that, only a few days before my visit to
Verdun, one of his staff-officers, returning alone and afoot from an
errand to Vaux, had fallen into a shell-crater and had drowned in the
mud. Indeed, the whole terrain is pitted with shell-holes as is
pitted the face of a man who has had the small-pox. So terrible is the
condition of the country that it often takes a soldier an hour to
cover a mile. What was once a smiling and prosperous countryside has
been rendered, by human agency, as barren and worthless as the slopes
of Vesuvius.

Verdun, I repeat, was held not by gun-power but by man-power. It was
not the monster guns on railway-trucks, or even the great numbers of
quick-firing, hard-hitting 75's, but the magnificent courage and
tenacity of the tired men in the mud-splashed uniforms, which held
Verdun for France. Though their forts were crumbling under the
violence of the German bombardment; though their trenches were pounded
into pudding; though the unceasing barrage made it at times impossible
to bring up food or water or reinforcements, the French hung
stubbornly on, and against the granite wall of their defense the waves
of men in gray flung themselves in vain. And when the fury of the
German assaults had in a measure spent itself, General Nivelle retook
in a few hours, on October 24, 1916, Forts Douaumont and de Vaux,
which had cost the Germans seven